I met a gay muslim

I had completely forgotten to blog about this. A couple of months ago, my school was hosting a dialogue on race or something like that during last November and I went to many of these activities though out the university campus. Anyways, one of the speakers was a gay Muslim. He was there to speak about how it felt to be gay and Muslim here in America. He began by introducing himself to the audience about where he lived (in New Jersey) and how he grew up (his parents was very strict Muslim). His parents were afraid that he and his two brothers would lose their faith in Islam, so they were forced to attend afterschool programs about the language and importance of being a Muslim. His family was the only Muslim and often minority in the community.

His parents taught him the value of education so he tried his best to excel in school but as he hit puberty, he started to notice that something was very wrong with him all though he did not know what it was at that time. He would often had period of confusion about his identity, especially about his sexuality and this would lead him to tried to excelled even more at school. He thought that if he tried his best at school than all this confusion would go away. He said that in his world, homosexuality did not exist nor did it ever enter his mind that he might in fact be gay. In his world, there was not even a word for homosexuality because no one really knows what a homosexual is and if they did, it was so horrible that words could not describe it. You know when something are too extreme for you consider to be true that you would not even give it a name or things that would never had cross your mind? Will that was how it was in his Muslim community.

When went off to college, he join a variety of academia and was president of the student body or something like that. He did all these great events and was an excellent student at the university but at night he was completely different. He was even president of the Muslim club on campus. He was so confused and frustrated with whatever that was wrong with at that time (remember, homosexuality did not exist in his world) that he would tried to go out and party in bars or wherever to forget these confuse feelings. So there were two sets of personality for him, by day he was the perfect student but by night he was party animal. Finally, his partying got so extreme that he crashes therefore forcing him to go to the hospital for exhaustion. While he lied in his hospital bed, he started thinking a lot about his life and the dangers that he entertain during the night.

He realized that he had never been attracted to girls nor had he tried to date a girl in his high school years and in his college years. Of course, he was the lone Muslim and a part of the few minorities that attend the white dominated high school so his parents would have disapproved of him dating outside his religion and race. So he thought to himself, why he isn’t attracted to girls. If he is not attracted to girls than that must mean that he is “gay”. The thought of being a homosexual sicken him because he never taught that his anger and confusion about who he was had anything to do with homosexuality. When he was release from the hospital, he started to do a lot of research about homosexuality. He also started an online forum, where Muslim can come together to talk about homosexuality. At first, he was very scared to bring up the subjects of homosexuality especially coming from a culture that do not even know that homosexuality existed.

After he started the first forum about gay Muslim here in America, he went to sleep and woke up the next day to discover this entire message about homosexuality for Muslims. There were many anonymous individuals who wanted to talk about homosexuality within the Muslim world and how it had affected them. He continues this gay Muslim forum for sixth month until he was discovered by someone on campus who shows it to the Muslim club. He was kicked out as president of the Muslim club and he began to write all kind of blogs and forum on the internet about homosexuality within the Muslim culture with his name on it. He also tried to contact the people who posted on his first gay Muslim forum but many of them were scared of communicating with him even if it was just an email exchange.

p.s. I had to go to my internship, will added more later